Bright-sided

How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

By: Barbara Ehrenreich

Narrated by: Kate Reading

Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided is a sharp-witted knockdown of America's love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism

Americans are a "positive" people—cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: this is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive, we are told, is the key to success and prosperity.

In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal nineteenth-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to "prosper" you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of "positive psychology" and the "science of happiness." Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes—like mortgage defaults—contributed directly to the current economic crisis.

With the mythbusting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America's penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out "negative" thoughts. On a national level, it's brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best—poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science, and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage.

Different kinds of positive thinking

Glad when Barbara finally got to talking solution at the end: balanced realism. The sneering voice of the writing (and reading) seemed really bitter until then.

I think maybe she and some positive thinkers miss the importance of a stepping stone between attitude and results. ACTION. It isn't enough to plan. To paraphrase Thoreau you must also proceed in the direction of your dreams.

Choosing to wallow seems a certain downward spiral into unproductivity resulting in feeling worthless and so forth.

But good points about skeptical pessimism keeping toddlers alive.

I am grateful to the writer for helping me see a connection between some excessive greed, and megachurches and positive thinking. But I think most spiritual and psychological users of positive thinking, vs purely business users, see that everyone has the power, we are interconnected and not better than others. Some emphasize service and love more than others.

It does help me understand the baffling perspective some seem to have of blaming the poor rather than empathizing. I am glad I stuck with this challenging book.

I have been a negative harbinger in the face of economic and health "woes" and i have been the pollyanna. Preaching embracing change. I found the latter more effective to productivity and group happiness.

Asking what would Barbara have us do instead? Maybe organize and act rather than accept as uncontrollable. That is food for thought.

I loved her prior sociological books eg nickled and dimed.

Such an applicable and important book!!

I can't wait to read and listen more by this author! (More words required. Ugh!)

Happiness Isn't a Virtue

This book will challenge the preconceived ideas anyone for anyone who subscribes to the idea of manifesting, the law of attraction, or the prosperity gospel.

Balanced

I was skeptical when I heard about this book since I know first hand what stress can do to the body. However, this book isn't an argument for pessimism so much as it's a call to action in the fight against the pervasive passivity that's been seeping into our culture. The "positive attitude" rhetoric that I'm constantly confronted with at school and work has been driving me nuts for years, and now hearing someone point out all its flaws provided me with a feeling of relief and (go figure) hope.

Norman Peale was a Charlatan; Thanks You Barbara!!

Barbara's fractally correct in every possible way here; one simply *cannot* choose to be happy. We would all be better off if we dismissed this blatant lie touted by Norman Vincent Peale. In her introduction, she addresses and clarifies the difference between hope (a natural, involuntary emotion we feel when things appear to be going our way, or, at the very least, appear to be improving) and optimism (a state of mind that can be cultivated through sufficient practice and expensive positivity seminars and/or prosperity gospel sermons). This is crucial - the positive charlatans of recent decades advocate forced optimism, not realistic, spontaneous, justified hope. This, obviously, would explain why on most happiness metrics, despite having a reputation has a "positive" country, the US scores deplorably. With an obscenely high poverty rate and prison population, this is hardly news to anyone living outside a cave. And, as Barbara astutely notes, positivity only works when it is not forced. Trying to impose happiness on oneself only leads to bitterness and a desire to rush home and switch off the Optimism Switch in one's head, for the culture of the US has been so polluted by positive thinking that many feel the only place they can be themselves (and realistic and/or pessimistic) is outside the gaze of others.

She shows how right-wing demagogues often cite pithy positive thinking platitudes as an attempt to blame those in perpetual poverty. And as we all know, those who fail to "will" the cancer away are never the subject of happy positive thinking books. And perhaps worst of all, positive thinking removes all motivation to improve societies and living conditions. External conditions are almost always dismissed by these gurus and charlatans.

Reading Smile or Die, I was reminded of a horribly callous sermon in Japan, where the pastor extolled the benefits of frugality and unequivocally spoke out against materialism. For his example du jour, he cited victims of the Haiti earthquake and how "happy" they were. Really? Is that the best they can do? If I lost everything and everyone I held dear in an earthquake, smiling might be the only way I could cope. It most certainly would not be a sign of happiness or satisfaction after going through such a grueling natural disaster.

Positive thinking has a horrible dark side that would lead to the instant dismissal of any doctor who prescribed positivity in lieu of radiotherapy for cancer. As anyone with any experience with the bile that Pollyannas spew forth on a daily basis, one of their implied mantras is "if you fail, it's your own fault." Spare me, please. On a personal note, I particularly enjoyed Barbara's mention of the Despair website, built around the idea of counter-optimism with its Demotivational line of posters, mugs, plaques, etc.

The author's research is impeccable. She unearths the deadly, fatalistic roots of positive thinking that came from the Calvinist branch of Christianity. Every word is enlightening and well worth reading.

Barbara ends this book with a clarion call to reason, citing some of the most cruel, heartless and ignorant consequences of positive thinking, including that of Rhonda Byrne, who claimed that tsunamis could only happen to those who are "on the same frequency as the event."

Everyone who has been deceived by positivity listen to read this book.